Mad Men, Season 4: Saarinen’s Curves

Martin Schneider writes:
Watching Mad Men the last two weeks (“Public Relations” and “Christmas Comes But Once a Year”), it’s been a shock to see how thoroughly its creators have used the plot point of a new office environment as an opportunity to pivot from what I’ve been calling the 1950s/”Sinatra” side of the 1960s to something closer to, say, Swinging London, not to mention Woodstock. I had once assumed that the show would find this transition difficult—at this point, I think this show can do anything.
The sight of the airy, sleek, symmetrical, somewhat plastic new SCDP office, with its Eero Saarinen furniture and Op Art wall decor, puts me in the mind of a possible key influence none of the smarties I read at Slate or Vanity Fair have mentioned—yet. I refer to Jacques Tati.
At the Awl’s “Footnotes of ‘Mad Men,'” Natasha Vargas-Cooper, excited about the new relevance of infidelity lyrics from “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” doesn’t seem to notice the fairly obvious Tati reference implied by a resonant screenshot of the show (I assume) she has posted. That is, this picture:

Myself, I can’t decide whether the Mad Men staff spent last summer screening Playtime or are barely conscious of the echo. I suspect it’s closer to the former option.

Competition Point: Which Punctuation Mark Is Loved the Most?

Aristophanes of Byzantium, head of the Great Library of Alexandria in the 2nd century B.C., is considered by scholars to be the inventor of punctuation. Aristophanes created a scheme for notating texts that that included a proto-period, proto-comma, and proto-semicolon.
Aristophanes: this new recount of our “punctuation contest”:http://emdashes.com/2010/07/so-you-love-punctuation-write.php, to win Ben Greenman’s new book, _What He’s Poised to Do_, is for you.
We have received many wonderful, creative, funny, sad, and inspiring letters. Ellipsis remains the leader with 16 letters of love… People love it a lot. Semicolon follows close behind with 12; semicolon is second but not secondary. The exclamation point is third!
**The current high rankings:**
Ellipsis: 16
Semicolon: 12
Exclamation Point: 9
Apostrophe: 8
Comma: 7
Period/Full stop: 7
Question Mark: 5
Quotation Marks: 5
Ampersand: 4
Asterisk: 4
Parentheses: 4
At sign: 3
Colon: 3
Interrobang: 3
Tilde: 3
Grawlixes: 3
Em dash: 2
Manicule: 2
En Dash: 2
Copyright symbol: 2
Hyphen: 2
All punctuation marks: 2
Number sign: 2
Brackets: 2
**From the “At Least I Got One Letter Department”**:
accent aigu, air quotes, at-the-price-of, bullet, caret, curly quotes, dieresis, dollar sign, exclaquestion mark, interpunct, macron, obelisk (dagger), Oxford comma, percent sign, pilcrow, pound sign, smart quotes, snark, space, underline.
**From the “No One Loves Me Department”**:
asterism, backslash, degree, ditto mark, double hyphen, inverted exclamation point, guillemets, lozenge, the “therefore” and “because” signs, slash, solidus, tie, prime, registered trademark, section sign, service mark, sound recording copyright symbol, trademark, underscore/understrike, vertical bar, pipe, tee, falsum, index/fist, lozenge.